Dr. Clifton works on data privacy, particularly with
respect to analysis of private data. This includes
privacy-preserving data mining, data de-identification and
anonymization, and limits on identifying individuals from
data mining models. He also works more broadly in data
mining, including data mining of text and data mining
techniques applied to interoperation of heterogeneous
information sources. Fundamental data mining challenges
posed by these applications include extracting knowledge
from noisy data, identifying knowledge in highly skewed
data (few examples of "interesting" behavior), and limits
on learning. He also works on database support for widely
distributed and autonomously controlled information,
particularly issues related to data privacy.

From September 2013-December 2015, he served as a Program Director at the National Science Foundation in the Information and Integration and Informatics cluster, also working with the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace Program. Prior to joining Purdue, Dr. Clifton was a principal scientist in
the Information Technology Division at the MITRE Corporation.
Before joining MITRE in 1995, he was an assistant professor of
computer science at Northwestern University.